It is common practice for a vendor to request payment for services rendered to a customer in the form of credit, debit, direct wire transfer or other like means to expedite payment processing. In other instances, remuneration for services rendered is in the form of a check, in which case it is advantageous for the vendor to process the check as quickly as possible. Some large vendors (e.g., banks, brokerage firms, telecommunication companies) receive thousands of checks per day from customers respective to their accounts, all of which must be processed efficiently to ensure proper account maintenance and payment processing. Consequently, many of these vendors employ high speed sorters—transport devices designed to sort mail articles into various bins—that are further equipped with systems useful for processing checks. After all, it is the desire of the vendor to extract checks from incoming envelopes for immediate processing or at least segregate those envelopes having an enclosed check from those which do not. Devices employed in conjunction with an inbound sorter for performing such processing may include magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) devices for detecting the presence of and interpreting the meaning of magnetic ink deposits commonly imprinted on checks, precision envelope cutters, document removal means for extracting checks and imaging devices for capturing an image of and subsequently decoding the characters placed onto the check.
It is generally preferred in most check processing sort operations that the check is oriented upright, facing forward in the same manner as the envelope; so that envelopes containing these checks may be quickly detected, opened and the sorted to a sort bin for immediate processing. Variations of this preferred orientation, or similarly variation in thickness or skew of the check within the envelope hampers such sort processing. The extent to which the check is unfavorably oriented, folded, merged or otherwise placed in the envelope may necessitate it to be sorted to a separate sort bin for subsequent manual processing. Moreover, this may require that additional downstream processing devices be employed in conjunction with the sorter to unfold, unmerge and otherwise manipulate the check so that it may be processed accordingly. Consequently, a need exists for enabling effective processing of documents (e.g., checks) by a high-speed transport device (e.g., sorter) despite the inevitable variations in the orientation of said documents that may occur.